


your dream turned into a nightmare when i crawled inside it

by Adversarial



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, And My Concurrent Refusal To Write Pro Wrestling Porn, BDSM, Blood and Injury, Breathplay, Bruises, Choking, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Enemies With Unresolved Sexual Tension to Enemies Who Should Talk About Their Feelings, Extremely Dubious Consent, Hashtag Monsterfuckers Anonymous, Heavy Angst, Love/Hate, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Monster!Tom, Painplay, Physical Abuse, Porn With Plot, Post-WTFuture, Rough Sex, Starvation, Subdrop, Subspace, This Fic Brought To You By My Obsession With Pro Wrestling, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, and the plot is sad, this was supposed to be straight-up porn but i fucked up and now there's plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:35:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26671519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adversarial/pseuds/Adversarial
Summary: It fucks with your head, the way he goes calm when you tighten your grip and hurt him. You'll slam him against the wall, he'll scramble for purchase, you'll punch him in the stomach and leave him wheezing. Eventually, the violence hits some critical point that has the two of you tearing off your clothes, his skin hot and flushed where he pulls you close. He kisses you like he wants to eat you alive, clings to you like he wants to melt into your body and stay there forever even as he's cursing your name and scratching bloody welts into your back.---Tom is the best bodyguard in the world, because he's going to be the one to kill Tord. He'll murder anyone who tries to beat him to the punch.
Relationships: Future Tom/Future Tord | Red Leader (Eddsworld), Tom/Tord (Eddsworld)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 71





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lifeupbeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeupbeta/gifts).



> Written as payment for a friend's fanart! Di, this one's for you.

There's this dance that the two of you do where he wants to be touched so badly that he'll pick a fight just so you'll choke him out.

It's not pretty, and you're not proud of it. You've been with Red Army for long enough that it takes him a while to rile you up-- you spend a lot of time biting your tongue when he's being deliberately obnoxious, and a lot more time in the training rooms after hours beating the shit out of sandbag after sandbag. You get used to swallowing your pride, and he makes sure you spend a lot of time doing it. He likes to needle, likes to make subtle insults. He's dismissive of you in front of your coworkers, constantly insulting your intelligence, getting up in your space, mocking you. You know it's on purpose. You know when he's getting really bad, too, because the bullshit will abruptly ramp up and he'll start tailing you around, making excuses as to why he needs to be breathing down your neck. Those are the days when the pupil of his one good eye is blasted wide open and he starts getting shaky, almost manic.

So there's a part of you that sees this, and that part of you aches. It's hard not to pity him like this, with his scarring and the way he keeps finding reasons to put his hands next to yours. There's another, much larger part of you that keeps rising to the bait, keeps snapping at him when he says something demeaning even when you see him flinch under the grin. This is the part of you that eventually gives him what he wants; you break, you get your hands around his neck and feel the way his pulse kicks up and he's still giving you that smile but there's something different behind it, something that looks a little too much like relief. It fucks with your head, the way he goes calm when you tighten your grip and hurt him. The way he'll start clawing at your arms if you let up too much. You'll slam him against the wall, he'll scramble for purchase, you'll punch him in the stomach and leave him wheezing. Eventually, the violence hits some critical point that has the two of you tearing off your clothes, his skin hot and flushed where he pulls you close. He kisses you like he wants to eat you alive, clings to you like he wants to melt into your body and stay there forever even as he's cursing your name and scratching bloody welts into your back.

When the two of you fuck, it's a riot of nails and teeth and writhing. Your hand pulling his hair, his mouth leaving hickies that you won't be able to hide the next day. It's ungodly hot. He ruins you for anyone else, leaves you thinking about ways to get him pissed at you so that maybe he'll do it again. This is the only time you can touch him without consequences. He's cuddly after you bang, constantly pushing into your space until he comes back into himself enough to mock you for holding him. You don't think he's ever really learned how to touch someone without hurting. You're not an exception.

When you think about the way he gets when you're just about hit him, flushed and giddy and excited like a child and leaning into it like he's trying to make it hurt worse, you wonder what all of this... Means to him. It throws you off balance in the way that Tord always throws you off balance, so you spend a while thinking that he's just screwing with you. You realize, several months in, when you're pretending to be asleep and he's quietly breaking into your room to curl up at the foot of your bed, that he's not. This is worse. He's gone by the time you wake up. He'd laugh in your face if you tried to bring it up in the daylight.

So you try not to think about it too hard. Eventually, he'll get needy again, and the cycle will repeat-- weeks of needling, your resolve breaking, you shouting something you can't take back, someone hitting someone and both of you exhaling tension.

If you miss him in the interim, while the bruises fade off both of your bodies, that's on you.

\---

You learn what he likes quickly.

He wants you to hit him, because of course he does. And to insult him. And to shove him into bed. And to break him down. He likes it when you take the lead, likes it even more if he doesn't get a choice. You learn that he's possessive (he likes leaving hickies where you can't hide them), and then you learn that you're possessive (which is a new feeling and one you're not really built to handle), and then you learn that neither of you cope well when one of you is flirting with someone else.

It's in the wake of one of those bad-coping kinds of weeks, where you have him by the wrists and you're slamming into him hard and vicious and he is delirious with relief, that you make your next connection: he wants to be taken in hand. He wants the catharsis of letting go. You hurt him, and it centers him. You hurt him, and he bares his neck to you and begs you for more. He wants you to drown him in his own intensity, and you're always, always happy to help.

You can't tell if he thinks he deserves it, or if he just needs you to rip him out of himself for a little while. It's irrelevant either way. You would kill someone for the opportunity to take this vulnerability of his and make it your own. You guard it jealously. You fuck him until he can't think and cradle him in your arms during the comedown, when he's too tired and sated and honest to pull away. He nuzzles his cheek against yours, struggles to get words out. He doesn't let go of your hand. You let him hold it so tight that you lose feeling in your fingertips.Later, when he's retreated back into the stronghold of himself, he'll say something nasty and kill this moment dead. It's just hard to brace for that when he's shivering with cold and maybe something else, tugging you around him like a living blanket. 

One time, you left him alone like this and he started crying. You'd never seen Tord cry before. Didn't really think he could.

You don't leave him like that again.

\---

So it's like this for a while. He's Red Leader most of the time: he makes speeches, he signs off on paperwork, he is a brutally efficient dictator, he sentences people to death. Sometimes, he's Tord: he wears his old hoodie under his army coat and still can't cook for ass and references shitty movies in conversations with people who won't notice it while you guard the door. You don't laugh, because you know he wants you to. This is still a war of attrition that you're fighting with him, even if some days it feels like it should be something else.

You settle into the rhythm he sets. Casual meanness, slow escalation, a lot of time spent wishing you were already at the end of the buildup. It feels like you never have enough time with him before he's back to pulling away again. It leaves you snappish, hungry for more.

You spend a lot of time wondering how deliberate it is.

\---

The first time the radiation poisoning kicks up, it takes five men and seven tranq darts to take you out.

You wake up brutally nauseous, face numb and cold where it's pushed against the concrete of the prison cell floor. For a split second, it feels like college again-- you go to pat yourself down for your keys, stop when you realize that, hey. Your hand is scaly.

That's about as far as you get before you start puking, and then you're distracted for the moment while your body tries to fall back asleep, empty your guts, and process a blistering headache all at the same time. This, you're used to. You can handle this.

When you've finished heaving and you're back to curling up pitifully on the ground, you hear him say your name.

"What," you mumble, and you blink the bars of the cell door into focus to see him standing just beyond them. Your vision won't focus enough to read his face, but you can see his overcoat. Red Leader, then. Not Tord.

"I said, you've cost me twenty thousand dollars in repairs," he repeats, and you groan. You bring your hand up to drag it down your face. Stop yourself right before a claw takes out your eye. "But this is certainly an interesting development."

"Interesting," you echo. Great. You let your eyes fall shut. For the first time in your life, you can feel a tail. If you focus, you can hear the scales of it rasp along the floor, and it throws off your sense of your body plan bad enough that you tip yourself over, nails scrabbling on the floor. The concrete gives.

Red Leader is still talking. You pick out the words "testing", and "DNA", and "living weapon", and you don't like any of them. The tail is still messing with you-- the feeling of moving it makes you feel uncertain, rolls your stomach. This must be the opposite of what Tord felt, when you burned his arm beyond salvage. You think about how he walks a little differently now. How he looks with his shirt off.

You gag again, vomit. He keeps talking.

\---

You spend a lot of time in the lab with him after that.

He pokes, prods, injects, gets his hands all over you. You're not a scientist, so you can't tell how much of this is necessary. You'd still bet money that he's touching you more than he strictly needs to.

Your body roils through its different forms in waves, scales fluttering out of your skin like moth wings before twisting back under it again. Every shift leaves you wrung out and miserable. He takes a lot of blood, shines a lot of lights into the voids of your eyes. His palms are warm and dry against the clamminess of your chest.

"Again," he demands, half-breathless. You grit your teeth together as they elongate into fangs. The skin he's touching warps. You don't want to keep doing this, but he's tracing his fingers down your sides now and you don't want him to pull away, either. He's getting close to his breaking point. Even through the scales, you can feel the tremor in his hands.

He pulls away from you. Dictates something about tensility to his laptop's speech-to-text. You let your head slam back against the table and try not to choke on your own breath.

\---

When you aren't in the lab, you're restricted to your own rooms. It makes sense. You're still not in control of your shifts. You've done a lot of property damage when the beast takes control. Quarantining you in your quarters instead of in a cell is a kindness.

Kindness or not, it's driving you insane. The beast doesn't like to be cooped up like this and it keeps trying to fight its way out. You wake up to migraines and busted furniture and your boots bitten to shreds. There are claw marks all over the walls. You give up on trying to clean up after yourself, concede to your apartment looking like it's been hit by a cyclone. When you're more stable, Red Leader has you in the lab, running you through test after test. When you're less stable, he has you restrained. Looks on at you from a safe distance while you thrash and roar and lunge for him.

If you got loose like that, he'd be a dead man. There's a fierce pride in you about that, buried under all the shame and frustration that come with the new lack of control. You think he knows it, wonder what he's thinking when he stands in front of you like he's baiting you. Like a _tease_.

\---

He's got you back in the lab. There's a set of probes stuck to your chest and head and an IV in your arm and he's standing over you, waiting impatiently for you to finish convulsing. "Come on," he says tonelessly, and it takes all of your restraint to retract your fangs. "There. Was that really so difficult, Thomas?"

You bare your human teeth at him. If you weren't looking for it, you'd miss the way his lips part when you do. His eye's not focusing properly.

"... Again," he commands, looking over at the EEG readout, and you could fucking _kill_ him.

\---

You're normally not this obsessed with him, you swear. You just haven't been allowed near any other people for three weeks now. The entirety of your world has been reduced down to your rooms, the labs, and Tord.

So when he starts to get bad again, you notice. You notice when his tremors get so bad that he drops pens. When the circles under his eyes start to look like bruises. He keeps looking increasingly terrible as he gets increasingly irritated with you in the lab. You can see the hunger in him when he checks your pulse, fingers tight and desperate around your wrist when the timer counts out and he has to let you go. The part of you that pities him aches to see him like this. Fantasizes about crawling off the table and digging your claws into his delicate body and forcing him to relax muscle by muscle until the tension's gone out of him entirely and he finally goes lax in your arms.

He's scared of you, maybe. He's all too aware of your lack of control. Keeps pulling back before he can rile you up enough to just _take_ what you want from him, leaving you both breathing hard and pissed off and starved for it. Keeps mocking you like he can't help himself. Keeps pushing. He's tap dancing on your last nerve and you don't know how much more you can take before you _snap_ and the dread's making a home out of your stomach.

\---

"Again," he says, and you can't tell if you're the one shaking, or if he's the one shaking, or if it's both of you shaking and riding the bleeding edge of something awful. He looks like he hasn't been sleeping, keeps balling his hands into fists before he can reach out to touch you. You catch a glimpse of the little crescent-shaped cuts on his palms. Your skin is crawling.

You do it again.

\---

You wake up with a pounding headache in a pile of shredded sheets. You drag a hand down your face, groan when the scales still scattered on your palm feel like sandpaper on your skin. There's dust in the blanket nest that looks like drywall, splinters of wood that came from your kitchenette table. You stumble over to your closet, pull what's left of the door aside. Unlock the safe at the bottom with your claws clacking on the metal. Pull out your phone. Check the time, then check your texts. Realize you're late for your labs because you spent too long destroying your bedroom last night and overslept. Groan again. Swear. Put back your phone, re-lock the safe, book it out the door barefoot as you shake the debris out of your hair. 

This month has been an exercise in getting used to the things that you can't change.

\---

When you get to the lab still half-awake and trailing plaster, he looks like he's on the verge of snapping.

"What the hell took you so long?" he demands. You're bristling before you can stop yourself. "You have _one task_ , Thomas, and you can't even get it right."

He looks about how you feel, strung-out and pallid and exhausted. The bags under his eyes are too dark, an ugly shade of purple that matches your scales. "Sorry," you say, not even trying to hide the lie, and there's one beautiful second where the rage flashes across his face and you think, that's it, he's going to push you over the edge and you'll _finally_ get to kick the shit out of him. You feel the anticipation like an ice pick to your chest. Your fangs are long and sharp in your mouth. Fuck. _Fuck_. You need this so fucking badly.

The moment passes. He restrains himself. You want to throttle him.

"Apology accepted," he says through gritted teeth. He points you up onto the table. You're grappling with your composure, your body shuddering with the effort of keeping the beast contained. You're glaring up at him and he's white-knuckling his clipboard. He can't even meet your eyes.

"Again."

\---

He stops trying to touch you after that. He looks at you as little as possible. Your interactions dwindle down to him giving you two-word orders in the lab. Sit up. Bite down. Move here. Stay still.

You're almost exhausted enough to beg for it. Your body is a kaleidoscope of pain and sensation and confusion and you're at the end of your rope and the fucker doesn't have the balls to even _look at you_ and you want to take his fragile little neck in your teeth and tear it open. You'd be losing to him if you did that, though, losing some years-long game of control that you've been playing with him since the day you met, and you could live without your dignity but you'd be fucking _damned_ before you swallowed your pride again.

You control yourself. You control yourself as he keeps slipping away, gets closer and closer to a breakdown. You control yourself when the vulnerability is clear and agonizing on his tired face. You control yourself when his movements get jerky and awkward, when he shivers while you devour him with your eyes. You lie strapped down on the gurney and he bites down hard on his lip when your back arches and your spine rearranges itself, again and again. One time, you show up to the lab to find Tord curled up in a neat little ball on the floor, trying to manage his breathing, and that almost breaks you for good. When you kneel down next to him, search yourself for the words that'll bridge the impossible gap between you, he barks out a hysterical laugh. Tells you to back the fuck off.

You keep your hands to yourself. You strap yourself down onto the table while he drags himself to his feet. You do it again.

\---

It's two months in. You are lying on the table, three switches down and half-transformed and fighting the urge to vomit. Tord has been shaking so bad that you've started doing your own IVs, just to spare you both the frustration of him missing your veins one-two-three-four times. You're ripping a needle out from the crook of your elbow, groping blindly for the bandages with a hand that's still shuddering into full dexterity, when you catch his wrist instead.

Everything stops.

You push yourself upright, ignoring the way your elbow's still dripping blood and how your stomach flips, to stare at him. He's gone stock-still, full deer-in-the-headlights, looking at you with a single wide eye. He opens his mouth like he's about to say something, looks panicked when no words come out. You feel the skin of your inner arm knitting itself shut while he struggles to talk, the metal of his arm so much more breakable in your grip than you'd ever imagined. "Tom," he finally says. His voice wavers on your name. Your hand is warping again. Your hearing's sharp like this: you can make out every quick beat of his heart. You can smell his adrenaline, heady and overwhelming. His breathing is picking up. The monster in you is saying, _prey_.

Your vision whites out for a second. There's a series of crashes, the sound of your skin ripping itself into something else. You're on the floor, kneeling over his knocked-over body. Your claws are dragging over the thick fabric of his overcoat, tearing through it like tissue. You're growling low in your throat, feel your tail swishing behind your slowly. Finally. Finally. You're going to _kill_ him.

You lean down over him, keep him pinned down. The tips of your fangs just brush his neck. You close your eyes and sink into the moment.

Under you, Tord stops resisting. It's surprising, makes you growl out in suspicion, pull back just enough to glare venom at him. His pulse is still rushing ungodly fast, flushing his skin bright even as he lays there unmoving. His neck is open to you. His hands are above his head. You're caught off guard when you hear him moan.

He chokes it back quickly, flushes even harder, but it's enough to confuse your body out of its bloodlust. Your hackles are up. You're pawing at his now-bare chest, your claws drawing thin lines of blood where they cut into skin, and Tord moans again, arches up into your touch. You pull away from him to sit back on your haunches, still growling, and he whimpers. There's a moment there where it looks like he's about to reach for you, drag your hands back down to keep cutting him, but he gets caught up in a full-body shiver instead.

"Please," he whispers, and it hits you in one harsh wave of lust.

Your palms are on him again and he sighs into your touch. The beast is redirecting its wrath into something hot and possessive, something that has you looming over his still body and rutting down against him. You bite at his neck hard enough to draw blood, suck on the skin until it bruises again and again. Every time you do, he relaxes a little further, falls a little deeper into the calm. When you finally pull away from his neck, trailing saliva and blood and a rattling sound in the back of your throat that might be a purr, his eye has fallen shut. You haven't seen him look that relieved in a very, very long time.

You find yourself leaning back in to lap at the puncture wounds with your too-long tongue. You're making soothing sounds as you caress his chest. It's instinctive, even though you're sure the roughness of your scales is only hurting him worse. He melts into the contact, muscles twitching as he tries to reconnect with you every time your hands leave his skin. He bites off the sounds he's making until you start nipping at the underside of his jaw, littering it with small bruises, and then he's breathing them out, gasps and quiet whines that make you dig your teeth in deeper. You hear a sound that might be your name. One that might be _more_.

When you go to rip off his pants, he presses his thighs together and keens, shifting under you in a way that makes you want to eat him alive. You shove his hips down and he cries out before going entirely limp, splaying his legs open. He's panting as you run your claws up and down the insides of his thighs, ripping his pants open and letting your nails drag across the sensitive skin there. He starts tensing again, rocking back and forth as he tries to find friction.

You lean back to watch him like that for a moment, claws digging into his hips as he moves. He's gorgeous like this, bruised and bloodied. The look of your marks on his pale skin fills you with fierce pride. He's yours. He's yours, and he's desperate and writhing under you, dick pretty as a picture and framed by the tatters of his pants as he whines. You growl out a warning, lean down snake-quick to bite down hard on his collarbone, and he moans as he goes perfectly still again. Just how you like him. You push his legs apart, leave him exposed. He's back to making soft sounds, tiny whimpers as he lets you move him however you want. This is what he's wanted all along: you, taking control from him as you let the monster take you both. You, pushing him further and further down into the pain until he's delirious with how good it feels. 

The part of you that's beast is already shoving off your slacks, eager to be inside him already. It's telling you to fuck him until he bleeds, to sate him through violence and to breed him and to murder anything that ever tries to touch him. It's purring its delight at how obedient he is for you, how desperately your mate wants you, how so very good he's being. How his body must be screaming out for you. How sweet it will feel to soothe him. How nice it will be to drown him in his own want, to fuck him until he's gone fragile and nonverbal and clingy and then to keep going until he's a sobbing wreck in your arms.

He doesn't move when you take his cock in your hand, doesn't move when you start to stroke it. The rise and fall of his chest picks up as he fights to stay still. You let your free hand rest on his hipbone, rub slow circles. He's trembling with exertion, trying to stop his hips from canting up.

His dick starts to throb with your attention, weeping pre that you smear around the rest of the head before you move your grip back down to knead at his shaft. If this were a normal fuck, you'd gladly take your sweet time working him up. As it stands, the monster side of you is already getting impatient. Your cock is aching, neglected. It feels thick and heavy between your legs. You need to be inside him already.

When you let go of him to line yourself up, he sobs. You're cooing at him as you pet his thighs, scraping them up as you move them even farther apart so that you can kneel between them. His dick is so hard that it looks painful. He's so well-behaved, letting you move him like a doll, not resisting as you rip off the remainder of his clothes to leave him fully exposed.

You flip him over easily, steadying him by his hips as he scrambles onto his hands and knees. The sight of him under you, ass tilted up to you as he shivers and struggles to hold himself upright, has you pulling him down onto you while he screams.

It's tight, too tight. The translucent, iridescent precum that you were leaking wasn't enough to get you slick and the friction burns something awful. His arms buckle, leaving him with his cheek slammed to the lab floor and his hips in the air, and he's crying in earnest now as you howl. The human part of you is panicked, trying to force its way into control to stop your body from doing something that will wreck him permanently, but the beast is too feral off its victory to let go. You start slamming into him at a feverish pace, dick burning with the feeling of skin tearing and regenerating and tearing again.

At first, Tord makes a weak effort to resist you. He tries to wriggle out of your grip, digs his nails into the linoleum floor, mumbles a long string of incoherent pleas as you fuck him bloody. You rumble out an inhuman sound, stab your claws deep into his sides. He stops when you do, goes entirely rigid for a moment before steadily relaxing. Finally, he lays there, limp, as you go back to purring, thrusting deep into him.

"Good boy," you say, and you don't recognize the rumbling bass of your voice. The hunger in it, though-- that's all you. You're finally finding your rhythm, now that he's no longer fighting you. " _My_ good boy. All mine. Nice and relaxed for me." You shift the angle of his hips and he jerks before relaxing again. You growl, hit it again. Again. " _Mine_."

He gasps like he wants to say something. Still can't find the words. The look in his eye is hazy, far away. You lose yourself in the heat of his body.

This isn't the first time you've fucked him like this, rough and impatient on the floor as he alternates between resisting and giving in to you, but there's an animal intensity to it that's driving you wild. Something about the way he's splayed out under you-- Red Leader, the man you want to kill more then you've ever wanted anything, submissive and entirely at your mercy-- has you hissing, slowing down your pace to make it last, to make sure he feels every second of it. You love the way he clenches around you. The way he starts pushing back into your rhythm to force you deeper into him. It's driving you insane.

"Fuck, Tord," you groan, and he closes his eye, slowly moves his robotic hand down to stroke himself. " _Mine_. My good boy. Want you so bad."

He shudders when you call him yours, clenches down on your harder as he starts stroking himself faster, and that's what pushes you over the edge. You swear as you cum, clawing desperately at Tord's chest as your vision whites out, marking him more. More. He's _yours_ , fuck, the monster in you wants to tear him open and crawl inside him and never, ever leave and you howl as you yank him upright by the hair to sink your teeth back into his neck.

Tord's gone still again, expression placid as you shudder through your orgasm. His dick still looks painfully hard, but he's let go of himself, waiting patiently for you to finish. It takes you almost a full minute to realize that he wants your permission.

"Come for me," you gasp out, voice still gravelly, and he tears up with relief as he goes back to touching himself. You're still breathing hard, fingers tangled in his hair as you run your too-long tongue over the bites all over his neck and shoulders. He doesn't last long-- all it takes is a few strokes and you tugging at his hair again before he's screaming, coming all over his stomach and the floor. You don't notice that you're nipping at him again until he's done, oversensitive and shivering in your lap. You let out an apologetic croon, kissing the fang marks, and Tord makes a confused sound. He tilts his chin back again, opening up the bruised column of his throat, and there's a part of you that's horrified when you bite down, suck another hickie onto one of the few unmarked parts of his neck. He's started rambling, voice hoarse and high-pitched, and it takes an effort to make out words in your post-orgasm haze.

"Please, please, please, fuck, please, _more_ , please, Tom, _fuck_ , let me, please, need it, need you," he whispers, even as he slumps back against your chest, exhausted. You don't like hurting him when he's fragile like this, but his begging is getting to you more than you'd like to admit. Something about the way he's clinging to your arm, like you're the only thing holding him together. "Wanna be a good boy for you, Tom, please, more, _hurt me_."

Despite yourself, you're obliging. You drag your claws slowly up and down his chest, leaving him nicked up and moaning, until the whispering stops and he closes his eye. "Good boy," you murmur, with one final nip for good measure, and he sighs into you. "Relax."

\---

The next half hour or so is a haze.

The beast has pushed you out entirely, so you only get quick vignettes of what's happening: you, pacing around the lab and smashing delicate equipment with your fists and tail. You, battering the doorframe until it's too warped to open or close. You, scraping the steel walls with your claws, marking your territory. The floor is sparkling with shattered glass that doesn't do anything to your bare feet. You're high off your conquest.

In the center of the lab, laid out in the scraps of his old clothes, is Tord. You can't leave him alone for long-- he keeps making these soft, pitiful sounds and the beast keeps snapping out of its fugue to come back to him. You curl up around him, chirp and croon and play with his hair until he settles down again and you can go back to your rampage. When you're done breaking things, you lay him out spread-eagle on the floor and lap the blood off every cut and bruise you left on him, until he's flushed and half-hard and your mouth tastes like copper. He looks so pretty like this, the unscarred part of his skin mottled with bruises and inflamed around cuts as your cum leaks out of him. His neck took the brunt of your attention, a mess of blue-black marks daisy-chaining their way across his throat like a collar, and you'd be lying if you said you didn't like it. That you didn't like all of this: him, finally relaxed as you lick your own cum from his thighs, fucked open and raw and all yours. Obviously yours, visibly yours. The way that he crawled over to lie in your arms, the way he kept offering his neck to you. You manage to restrain yourself and just mouthing at the broken skin. That seems to be enough pain to soothe him for the moment.

You should be panicking right now. You know that. You've destroyed god knows how much tech, fucked up your Leader in more ways than one, tore his lab up probably beyond repair. You're going to pay for this later, and you're going to pay for it dearly.

More than that: you've wrecked Red Leader's ego, and the repercussions of that alone should be enough to sign your death warrant. Tord might be finally soothed for the first time in months, but Red Leader was a different animal entirely. Once Tord was aware enough to really think through what you'd done, you were doomed.

You should be panicking. Instead, you're shuddering yourself into something resembling human, mumbling reassurances to the top of your enemy's head as he falls asleep against your chest. The beast is still there, possessive and hot under the thin veneer of your control but satisfied enough with itself for the moment. You're bone tired. Tord is a warm weight against you, looks peaceful in his sleep in a way you're not used to seeing on him.

So maybe this is going to be what kills you. Not a gunshot wound, not a government official with an army knife, not even Red Leader, even though your money has always been on that last one. It's not even Tord, really, as much as you'd love for him to be the one to finally do you in. It's just the two of you together, always one step away from your mutually assured destruction. It's you and him locked in your usual death spiral, the combination of your need to hurt him and his need to bleed out leaving you high off each other before it all comes crashing down. It's not like any of this is a surprise. You knew what you signed up for the day you followed him.

So you make peace with all of this one last time and you make yourself comfortable on the lab floor. Shift Tord, gently, so that his head is pillowed on your arm and not on linoleum. Take in your own sick joy at dragging the Red Leader down to your level. Brush his bangs out of his eyes. Settle in for a nap, maybe even a real eight hours' sleep for once. Let go.

Something was always bound to give. You're just shocked it took this long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead, promise!
> 
> Next chapter's already in progress and will be up as soon as it's done; it might get split into two chapters if it gets too long. I'll update y'all on the state of my other WIPs then!


	2. Chapter 2

You've already figured out why you came with him.

It took a while. When you followed Tord out the door and into Red Army, you hated him more than you had ever hated anyone else. You were obsessed with him. You were possessed by the urge to tear him down, to find the chink in his armor and rip him wide open. You thought about it when you woke up in the morning, when you went to bed at night, idly, during the day, driving to work or doing the dishes. He was all-consuming like that. It confused you that you let yourself be convinced to go, because you were still operating under the delusion that hatred meant that you wanted to stay as far away from him as possible.

You brain clearly didn't get it yet, but something in you must have: you dropped your whole life for the chance to loathe him up close and personal. Packed up, moved out, left your two best friends hanging all for the chance to play house with a man you couldn't stand. He promoted you to his lieutenant and you couldn't understand why he would do that. You told him you'd kill him someday, and here you were, his bodyguard. His life fragile in your hands. You'd thought it was an insult, at first. Got real pissed.

And, sure, that was probably at least half of the justification: you'd gotten pissed about it, he's cracked that huge shit-eating grin, and you'd hit him and he'd kicked you in the shin with a steel-toed boot and it turned into another one of your pin-him-to-the-wall-and-make-him-bleed moments that left you both panting and bruised and he gave you a _look_ , then, furious and starving and desperate, and that was when it hit you. What this really was. Why you followed him.

You're the best bodyguard in the world, because you're going to be the one to kill him. You'll murder anyone who tries to beat you to the punch.

\---

You wake up after an indeterminate amount of time to a pounding headache and Tord squirming. It takes you a second to remember where you are, and another one to try and figure out what he's doing.

"Why are you--" you grumble, lifting your arm to let him out from where he was tangled up with you, and he shrugs you off, sitting up with a wince and squinting as he takes in the rest of the room.

"... Thomas," he starts, and you tense. You know that tone. "What the hell have you done to my lab?"

He rises to his feet, unsteady, and you watch the mixture of expressions that cross his face. When he glares down at you, you bare your teeth on reflex.

"You useless fucking _mutt_ ," he shouts, and if it wasn't for the fact that this situation was way too familiar for comfort, you'd be laughing at the absurdity of it. He's naked, bloody, covered in hickies, pissed as hell and trying to cow you into submission. His stupid fucking cowlicks are still sticking up, and you focus on that because otherwise you'll pay too much attention to the way your cum is slowly dripping down the curve of his thigh. "I'm going to _kill you_."

His rage is thunderous, and if you were still the type of person who could be killed, you'd be terrified. As it is, you're functionally invincible and you know him too well to miss the subtle ways he's cuing you, even if he hasn't figured it out yet. He's moving to close the distance between you, metal hand balled into a fist like he's about to swing. You can smell the fear on him. See the way he's shaking.

You know what he really wants.

"Shut up," you growl, and he brightens just the slightest bit when he goes to hit you.

You catch his fist in a scaly palm right before it hits your cheekbone, not bothering to get up from where you're laying on the floor, and Tord overbalances, falls on top of you. You wrap him in a bear hug as he tries to pull away from you.

" _Down_ ," you order, and there's a split second where he's struggling where you worry that you misjudged him. When you show no sign of letting him go, Tord lets out a shuddering breath and relaxes. You move a hand to cradle the back of his head, still holding him tight against you as you wait for the fight to drain out of him.

He wants to be taken in hand. Wants you to domesticate the wild parts of him. Wants you to beat the shit out of him, and the fastest and best way for him to get you to do that has always been to swing first.

"Good boy," you deadpan when he stops resisting, just to be a prick, but his sigh of relief is too genuine. You're not used to him submitting to you this easily, and the change has you feeling off-kilter. You experiment, rest your palm on the back of his neck, and it earns you his shivering. "Aren't you easy today?"

"Fuck you," he mumbles to your collarbone, and you tug a little on his hair just to shut him up. He's parting his legs so that one of yours is between them. The abrasions on his thighs must still be tender, because he makes himself whimper when he rubs them against your skin.

"So needy," you exhale, and that's enough to drag him under. There's a shift in his body language as he starts to rock himself against your thigh-- he's gone docile, starts pressing soft kisses to your bare chest. You usually have to rough him up way more to gentle him like this. "Does it feel that good to be my little bitch?"

He doesn't say anything, but the pace of his rocking picks up. You were expecting a fight, or at least a denial. The human side of you is more than a little freaked out by how deep into it Tord already is.

The beast is thrilled.

Tord shudders when your body begins to twist, his thighs getting pushed even farther apart as it does. He sits up, leans back so that he's riding you, tilts his chin up to show off all of the bruising, and the monster is singing his praises.

"There you go," you hear yourself saying. You're tilting your leg up to give him more friction, watching him pleasure himself with lidded eyes. "Feels good, doesn't it? Pretty boy, good boy. All mine."

He nods quickly, too quickly, and bites his lower lip to stop himself from moaning. You're reaching up to draw your claws over his hips again.

"Relax," you purr, and he takes a deep breath, exhales his tension as you scratch him. "Good. That's a sweet boy. My sweet boy. Takes my marks so well. Nice and relaxed."

Your words are pushing him down deeper, and Tord is struggling to keep moving against you. You can see the way he's fighting to not go entirely boneless against you. It doesn't look like he can resist much more.

"Shhh," you say, and his hips stutter to a stop. "There you go. Lie still."

He obeys, lays down on top of you again, breathing hard. His erection's trapped between you, and you shift around under him just enough to make him gasp. "Good boy," you breathe, right into his ear. Your hands ghost over his back, squeeze his ass. You're toying with him. "Pretty little thing. Wants me to play with his body. Wants to bleed." You nip at his ear and he whines, stays still. "Very obedient."

"Please," he whispers, in that high voice that you're starting to recognize as a sign that he's entirely gone. " _Please_ , Tom. Want it."

You rumble out a laugh. "Gonna make you feel so good," you promise, nuzzling at his neck. He cries out, tensing before he goes lax again. "So sensitive. Needy boy." You're punctuating your sentences with nips to his throat, layering bruises onto bruises, and you can feel him already leaking pre on your stomach. "Mm. You like that? You like when I bite you?"

He gasps, nods instead of speaking, and you bite him harder as reward. "Gonna fuck you til you cry. Mine, all mine. Gonna leave your pretty chest all marked up. Hurt you so good. You like that, pretty?"

His breathing is quick, erratic. His hands are spasming on your chest like he's fighting not to dig his nails into you. You watch as the muscles in his legs tense and relax as he fights the urge to grind down. You're barely touching him, and he's already a wreck. He doesn't respond to your question.

"Too needy to talk, hm? Want it too badly?" You shove your knee upright and he's back to having his thighs forced apart. His resolve breaks. He starts humping your leg again, struggling not to cry. "So desperate for me. Can't even stay still." You bounce your leg and he keens, long and loud. "Tell me. What do you want?"

Tord's shaking his head, whimpering as he keeps moving his hips in quick jerks against your leg. You reach up with one scaly hand, catch him by the throat, and he chokes. " _Tell me what you want_ ," you repeat, flexing your fingers just enough to make him miss a breath, and he starts crying in earnest as he starts to plead.

"Please, please, please, god, _fuck_ , Tom," he says, quiet enough that you have to strain to hear it over his gasping. "Want you in my mouth. Fucking my throat. _Please_." He's scratching at your arm, his blunt fingernails leaving lines of broken skin that knit quickly back together. "Need to be a good boy for you, please, need it so bad."

"Very good," you purr, letting go of his neck to pat his cheek, and he presses hungrily into your touch. When you take your hand away to grab him by the hips and lift him off your leg, he winces at the loss. "Hush now," you murmur, while he settles between your thighs. You tangle your fingers in his hair, enjoy the way he looks hazily at your cock. "Good boy. Go ahead. Suck."

He takes a second to shudder at the command. He takes another to close his eye and leave a line of small kisses up your shaft, sighing as he does, and you growl, tighten your grip in his hair.

He's thorough in his attention, lets his lips trace up and down, up and down, leaving nips and little kitten licks that have you digging your claws into his scalp. He runs his tongue over your glans in a series of slow strokes that have you groaning his name, before finally giving in and taking you into the wet heat of his mouth. 

You're too large for him to blow easily, and he struggles to take more than half of your shaft until your impatience wins out and you start thrusting, too caught up in the intoxication of his throat fluttering around you to care when he starts to panic. "That's my obedient boy," you pant, holding him in place by the hair while you push deeper into his throat. "So good for me. Feels so, so good." You hadn't noticed he was digging his nails into your sides until he stops, hands going motionless as he gives in again, lets you fuck him. "Needy boy. You like this. You like when I treat you rough." You pick up the pace and he does his best to relax his throat. "Go ahead, pretty. Touch yourself."

You feel his whine as a vibration against your cock, and it drives you wild. You're forcing yourself deeper into his throat as he chokes on you, cries, struggles to touch himself while still sucking you off. You watch the moment he comes, his whole body going taut as he tries to scream, and the way he goes from rigid to yielding against you. You don't pull out until it starts looking like he's on the verge of passing out for real.

You start stroking yourself, still slick with his saliva, looking down at his half-conscious face and bruised body. He's yours, the beast is saying, he's yours and he's lying well-fucked and exhausted between your legs, your mate marked up and leaking your cum. So needy that he'll beg for you. So obedient that he'll do whatever you ask. You've got his name on your lips as you finish, arching your back as your vision whites out.

When you come back into focus, trying to situate yourself in your body as you get a handle back on your self-control, you feel the rasp of his tongue against your stomach. "What are you..." you start, voice a rasp. Then, "oh."

He's lapping the cum off of you, and the image of it is almost enough to get you hard again. His eye is half-closed, his lips are still a little bruised from the way you like to bite them. "Tord," you say, and he sighs, nuzzles your softening erection. " _God_."

He's still too far gone to talk, so you let him lick you clean before guiding him carefully over to lay down next to you. He's shaking too hard to cling to you the way he normally does, so you cling for him: you wrap him in your arms and let him hide himself against you. "Hey. Tord." He hums in recognition at his name, but otherwise doesn't respond. "You okay?"

You ask him right as another wave of chills hits, and the time it takes for him to answer stretches on far past comfortable. "... I did good, right?" he finally says, his head pressed firmly into the junction of your neck and shoulder. It's still the whisper-voice, high and scared and far enough from Tord as you know him to leave you worried that you may have actually, permanently screwed something up. Your hold on him tightens without you meaning for it to. "I'm your good boy?"

You must be taking too long to answer, because he starts getting restless-- the shaking gets worse, and there's a second there where you think that he's trying to pull away from you. "You're my good boy," you reassure him, because you have no idea what else to say and he's starting to freak you out, and that seems to be the correct thing to say. His body relaxes, finishes another cycle of tension and release.

"Your good boy," he echos, and there's something about the way that he looks so relieved that feels viscerally wrong to you. It's too intimate, too vulnerable. Tord would die before letting you see him like this. You're petting his hair like he's an animal, and he's butting his head up into the affection. "All yours."

"All mine," you say, and you're wondering how much of that is the sex and how much is the monster and how much is just you, finally being honest about what you've always wanted from him.

\---

It's hard to tell how long has passed in the lab-- you'd smashed the wall clock in your rampaging and you'd left your cell phone back in your quarters, so you track the minutes by the steady time of Tord's breathing and the hours by the way his bruises fade from panicked-pink to violet to mottled green-blue. You don't feel hungry at all, barely feel thirst, but you're starting to think that it's a side effect of your mutation that you're not getting worn down.

It's been at least a day that you've been shut in here with him, maybe a little more, and far be it from you to be a worrier but Tord is starting to concern you. He's been asleep since your last fuck, an unknown amount of time ago, and that's fine by you. You're not sure what you'd know what to say to him if he was awake. Either he'll be himself again, mask firmly back in place and ugly-laughing at you for being so gentle, or he'll still be panicked and small and looking to you to hurt him until he feels safe. Both options make you feel nauseous. You get stuck trying to decide which is worse, looking down at him sound asleep on the tile, until you abruptly can't take it anymore and get up to do literally anything else.

You distract yourself by pacing around the lab while he naps. You check out the damage you've done to the doorframe, which is both considerable and also probably why no one has managed to make it inside to tranq you yet, and then it hits you that _you_ were the one who tore through the solid steel of it and it leaves you uneasy. You inspect the broken glass scattered across the floor, make a halfhearted effort to sweep it up so that it doesn't cut your mostly-human feet. You fill a clean beaker with water from the sink and leave it next to Tord, for when he wakes up. You find where your jacket got thrown in the chaos and drape it over him. You run out of things to do and resort to sitting on the floor next to him while he dozes, facing the wall. Protective and possessive, always the faithful bodyguard. Maybe he'd been right about you from the start.

So you look around the lab and the wreckage you've caused, and you don't look at Tord and the mess you've made of him, and you wait for him to wake up and tear you to pieces again, one way or another.

\---

More time passes. There's a high-pitched humming that starts up on the edge of your hearing. At first, you think you're imagining it.

Later, you realize a few things: that it's real, that it's coming from the doorway, and that it's getting slowly but steadily louder. Someone's drilling through the door to come get you out.

Correction: they're drilling through the door to come get Red Leader out. If you're killable, which is currently a pretty big tossup, you're about to become collateral damage.

You figured you'd feel something besides a kind of morbid humor about it by this point, but that's about all you can dredge up.

\---

When you finally hear Tord stirring a few hours later, you'd estimate that they're halfway through the door. The monster in you is prowling around right under the surface of your skin, pissed at the idea that someone is trying to enter its territory and steal its mate, and it's taking an effort of will on your part to keep it down.

"G'morning," you drawl, trying to keep the growl out of your voice. You're still sitting next to him, a respectable six inches of space between you. You keep your eyes firmly on the door while you listen to Tord shift. He pulls your jacket tighter around him. He's probably cold. You hate that you're bothered by it. "How're you doing?"

More shifting, and his chin is coming to rest on your shoulder, making you jolt. "Mmm. Weird," he says, and his breath tickles your ear. "Dizzy. A little drunk." He scoots closer to you, drapes himself over your back. He clasps his hands in front of you. "You should do that again," he murmurs, running his nails across your chest to demonstrate what it is that he wants. It tickles.

"You should drink something," you grumble, before he can talk you into anything. You reach over for the beaker you'd filled earlier, put it into his clasped hands. You don't shove him off of you, even though you probably should. He obliges you, leaning up against your back while he rehydrates. Then, "the door should be opened again in a few hours, tops."

Tord pauses when you say that, his expression left to your imagination. "Who's opening it?" he asks, hunching down smaller underneath your longcoat, and you're left fighting the urge to pull him into your lap and... You're not sure. Hold him, maybe.

"Probably Paul," you guess, both because it's a safe bet that he'd taken on the responsibility of neutralizing you in Red Leader's absence and because you're hoping that it'll soothe Tord out of the unhappy huddle he's curling into behind you. Paul was always the best shot with the tranq gun. "What, would you rather starve in here? I figured you'd be relieved."

You're skipping over all of the obvious points: that you'd effectively trapped him here, that whoever was coming to retrieve him might just die in the process, that the odds of you surviving the altercation were a coin flip. Tord will be fine-- if the beast hadn't killed him yet, you doubted it would now, and his soldiers were the kind of loyal that made you wonder if he was running an army or a cult. You'd assumed that these were all things that he'd accepted as inevitable from the moment you'd fucked up and grabbed his wrist. It's only dawning on you now that he might have not, and it's leaving cracks in your cheerful numbness.

He doesn't say anything. Instead, he shuffles around behind you until he's wrapped his arms and legs around you, forehead resting on your shoulder, your coat still draped over him. He's using you for your body heat, you know that, but the intimacy of it all still leaves your heart heavy and confused in your chest. You don't know what's going through his head, but you're beginning to think that you've misjudged a lot of very important things about him.

"... Tord," you start, trying to turn around and face him, but he digs his heel into your side before you can finish the thought.

"Shut up," he says to your shoulder. His grip on you tightens and your pulse stutters. All at once, his exhaustion's back. "Just shut up and let me have this."

That's all the confirmation you need. You keep your mouth shut, face the door. You don't say, _I think I get it now, what all of this means_. You don't say, _I'm sorry_. You don't say, _This isn't what I wanted_.

You wait. Ignore your mounting dread.

\---

The drill makes it through the doorway after Tord's calmed down enough to let you go. He put on your coat properly a little while ago, rolled up the sleeves and popped the collar and sat down back-to-back with you. You extend him the courtesy of not commenting on it when he goes to reach for your hand, realizes that they're in your lap, pulls away.

"Any last words?" you ask, when the drill bit gets re-angled to extend the hole. You figure you can hold the monster down for another thirty seconds, maybe a minute, before you lose your grip and this turns into a bloodbath. Your skin is shivering from the effort of staying skin.

He rises to his feet, and when you twist to look up at him, he rests a hand on your shoulder. He's managed to cover up the worst of the marks on his neck with your jacket, and there's an imperiousness to the way he's holding himself that puts you reflexively on edge. Without his eyepatch to cover the mess of his scarred eye, he looks demonic.

"Stand down," Red Leader commands. You snarl at him, your control slipping as the grinding sound of metal-on-metal from the doorway grows louder.

\---

It's funny, you think, as the door finally caves and the monster shoves you out of yourself and your body corrupts into something seething and vicious, how Red Leader can rule you. How it takes Tord to rule the beast. The way your rough edges fit together, not frictionless, but together all the same. Maybe you grew to anticipate each other over the years. Maybe the two of you just fell into place, inevitable as a row of dominoes from the first time you met. Maybe you carved each other's chests open when you both decided against all good sense to make your homes there, and the resulting damages have left you both too fucked for anyone else.

It's funny in the same way that watching someone trip and fall is funny. Something that was bound to happen, happens, and you're left feeling like an idiot for believing you could fight against gravity and win.

\---

You don't remember much of the scene that follows. The monster is a wraith, huge and barely restrained by Red Leader's presence. Your tail whips behind you as you stalk back and forth behind him, while Red Leader has a conversation that you can't parse with an agitated Paul. Again, you get vignettes: Red Leader, stone-faced and easy in his confidence. Paul, going from confused to perturbed to irate, drill dropped so that he can keep his hand on the tranq gun at his hip. Paul, disbelieving. Paul, trying to enter the lab. Paul, hands up in surrender, backing out of the room after you'd lunged for him, brow furrowed, gun holstered. Red Leader, perfectly calm as you loom over him, fangs bared and claws out, staking your claim. The monster's point made crystal clear: no one is allowed in, Tord is not allowed out. The threat of mass violence if this balance is disturbed.

You've gone drinking with Paul enough times that you can guess at his half of the conversation: you're unstable, a constant threat to Red Leader's safety. You were a liability even before this. There's still four soldiers in the med bay from the last time you got loose. The risk-benefit analysis to leaving you alive wasn't coming out right. Never has.

You have no idea what Red Leader said, if he defended you or if he pulled rank or if he just told Paul to come back with reinforcements and a grenade. You'd guess that the last one wouldn't have left Paul so uneasy.

The speculation's irrelevant. What matters is that Paul's gone, leaving the beast alone with Red Leader for the moment and the door unlocked. You're floating somewhere to the left of yourself, a spectator in your own body-- the beast is too enraged by the encroachment on its territory to let your common sense through. You're facing down Red Leader, between him and the doorway, and he's haughty, self-assured, even though he's wearing nothing but your coat and your marks.

Slowly, deliberately, he bares his bruised neck to you.

The monster's on him in under a second, bowling his over and knocking him to the floor. You're rubbing up against him like a cat, cheek to cheek, scales leaving faint abrasions on his skin as he pulls you closer, Red Leader fracturing like glass under the affection to reveal Tord underneath.

The whiplash is disturbing to you, even as the beast lets Tord guide your hands around his throat. You want to ask him what happened, what he said to Paul, why he said it, what kind of devil's bargain the two of you are striking to stay here, together, like this. You don't know how much time you have left to borrow, and the uncertainty drags the dread right back to the forefront of your mind.

"Why?" you ask, and the word comes garbled as your tongue disobeys you. Tord is tense, waiting impatiently for you to bear down. When you hesitate, he starts to squirm. "What the hell are you doing?"

" _Just let me have this_ ," he insists. He's unbuttoning your jacket with shaking fingers, looking up at you with an expression of naked desperation that's getting you hard, even as your apprehension grows. "Don't make me think about it."

The monster obeys, tightens your grip even as you try to resist it. Tord sighs, relieved. Stops breathing.

\---

Something has to give, you think, as you watch yourself dig your teeth into him while he struggles for air. It has to. You can't stay in this limbo with him forever. Eventually, he'll have to leave, or someone will come in, and the monster will cut a path of destruction through the entire army base in its grief and this entire house of cards will come crashing down around you both. You're just prolonging the inevitable.

In the meantime, you let go of his throat and hurt him something beautiful and he chokes on nothing and begs you for more.

\---

Later, when the monster has taken what it wants from him and soothed him to sleep with its violence, you take stock of his body.

He's bruised and bitten, your marks marring the normal pale planes of his skin and crisscrossing over the scar tissue. You can trace the lines of claw marks over his chest and back. You're sure that he's sore, sure that the he itches where the older cuts are starting to heal over. The fingernails on his human hand are bluish-- from blood loss or from going close to two days without food or both, you can't tell-- and when he wakes up and reaches out to touch your face, his fingertips are cold. His hair's a mess. He's relaxed, smiling at you like you've done something right for once, while the beast folds itself around him.

You don't want this. You don't want him touching you gently. It makes you wish for things you realized, long ago, that you can't have with him.

The monster leans in, pulls Tord closer. You are so, so tired.

\---

You're woken up, body caught at the halfway point between forms, by Tord.

You're assuming it's nighttime. He's restless, clambering on top of you and pinning you to the floor, nervous energy radiating off of him with an intensity that makes you nauseous by extension. Somewhere in this process of being locked in together, you'd finished stripping him of his ability to hide his emotions. Now, each of them passes through him and into you with all the subtlety of a battering ram. You've never figured out how he managed to store that much raw emotion inside himself without collapsing. You're wondering now if he actually can.

"Tom," he's saying, shaking you awake. "Tom, get up."

"Mmh," you manage. Your canines are trying to decide whether they want to be teeth or fangs. "I'm up."

"Good," he says, and he seems anything but. "Now hurt me."

You don't bother asking stupid questions like _why_. You're both beyond that point. "I don't want to," you mumble, and his hold on your wrists becomes vice-like.

"You're lying," he counters, with perfect certainty, and he's right. You hate that he's right. "Go on. Do it already."

You want to keep refusing. You want to prove him wrong about you, want to prove you wrong about yourself. You want to be the kind of person who doesn't feel a sick vindication when your fist connects with his face, who doesn't get turned on when the man you hate is too far gone to think for himself and he comes crawling to you for mercy. At the very least, you want to be strong enough to pretend to be better than you really are.

You're not, though. And he knows it, and you know it, and there isn't any point in pretending otherwise.

So you give him what he wants. You rip your wrists out of his hands and dig your nails deep into the bruises on his sides. Watch as Tord surrenders, lets go of whatever it was keeping him hostage in his mind to let you take control. Pull him under, to the place where he doesn't have to think about anything besides the two of you and the sharp points of contact between your bodies. Resent him, maybe, for leaving you alone to pick up the pieces and for reminding you that you aren't better than this. That you have never been better than this.

You settle him back down into sleep.

\---

When you wake up for real, there's a moment of disorientation as you blink the world into focus. Then, you realize that Tord isn't next to you anymore.

The beast is out before you can think to restrain it, howling and feral, and when you catch sight of him sitting on the other side of the lab by the door the response is instant. You're vaulting over to him in a blur of superhuman motion. When you come crashing to a stop next to him, fangs and claws and savage intentions bared, he startles, flinches away from you, and the person you hadn't noticed in the doorway swears as they recoil.

"This is exactly what I was talking about, Tord!" Patryck shouts, after he's quickly backed several feet away from the doorframe. He's unarmed, seems to be alone. You watch yourself continue to growl at him with increasing self-loathing. "This is _exactly_ what Paul and I were talking about!"

"I know," Tord grits out. He's crosslegged on the floor, too anemic to stay standing, your longcoat wrapped around him like a shock blanket. He's got a plastic bag in his hands-- it smells like fresh food, cotton fabric, isopropyl alcohol, bandage adhesive. Never let it be said that Patryck isn't thoughtful. "I know, you're right, I _know_."

"So do something about it already," Patryck demands. He keeps backing down the hall, eyes narrowed and staying on you. "Or we're going to do something _for_ you, orders be damned."

Tord doesn't respond to that, and Patryck turns on his heel, leaves. The monster turns back to face Tord, growl still rumbling low in your throat, and he pulls your coat tighter around himself. You're sizing him up, even as the monster pins him down and he surrenders. As you wrench the tension out of him with your nails, bit by agonizing bit, and he doesn't resist. You're trying to see if he has it in him to put a stop to this before it gets forcibly ended for you both.

When the beast lets him go, satisfied now that he's freshly bloodied, he pulls you back in for a frantic kiss and you realize that you're both doomed.

\---

From your place outside yourself, you start laughing. You can't figure out why at first. All you can feel is pissed: pissed with him for not being strong enough to end you himself, pissed with him for building up this goddamn impasse in the first place, pissed with yourself for never being strong enough to walk out on him, pissed with the world for building you into the kind of man who would fall like this at all. You're angry, because if you let yourself feel the other, larger thing roiling just below the surface, you're going to go to pieces and there will be nothing left of you to salvage.

But isn't this the place where humor always comes from? Twisting the futile parts of rage and shame into something you can still sleep with at night? If you're fiddling while Rome burns, gaping hole in your chest and all, isn't that a victory in its own right and a whole fucking comedy besides?

So you laugh, and your body doesn't, and all you can do is watch helplessly as Tord look up at you and the monster both with a soul-crushing devotion that leaves you both damned. And you and the monster lean down together and kiss him, because why fucking not, right? Why fucking not. Everything's going up in flames anyways. You might as well get your money's worth.

\---

He eats something, clumsily cleans and bandages a few of the worse lacerations on his legs and sides while the monster holds him, hissing continuously at the door. You think that you see clothes in the bag Patryck left him, but he doesn't try to dress himself.

It makes sense, you guess. You'd just wind up shredding them off him again anyways.

\---

You fuck him again.

You tear the medical tape and cotton pads he'd just managed to put on, open up old wounds, leave him breathing ragged and shuddering and powerless on the floor. Maybe it's because the monster's insatiable, maybe it's because you want to see him suffer, maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe you're just lying to yourself again. Who knows.

Doesn't matter. You're snuggling with him through the comedown, the beast content and Tord rambling his way through a litany of pleas that you can't make out and don't really want to. You pet his hair, let him shiver against you. Soon, you think. Soon, someone is going to come through the door. And then this is going to end, and maybe you'll die, and maybe you won't, and either way, you'll never have this again.

\---

You could kill him, you think. If you rallied the last of your energy, threw the beast out for just a few seconds. You just needed long enough to snap his neck. You spend so much time with your hands around it already. He's barely awake in your arms, weak from starvation and blood loss. It'd be simple. It'd be everything you've ever wanted.

\---

He's fading in and out of consciousness. It's been about three days by your estimate that you've both been in here, and his body's been well and truly fucked in more ways than one. Honestly, you're shocked that he stayed lucid for as long as he did.

You manage to get some water into him, after a few tries-- the beast keeps shattering the beakers in your grip before you can fill them-- and he looks... Not great. Really not great. In the harsh fluorescent light, he looks ghost-pale, like he's already dead. At one point, he tries to walk across the lab and his legs buckle after just a few steps and it takes all of your effort to contain the unbearably tender feeling that floods you with.

When you go to pick him up off the floor, doing your best not to injure him worse in the process, he takes your wrist in his too-strong metal hand and looks you in the eyes and says, "Tom, I--" and you kiss him quickly just to shut him up.

\---

Soon, you think. Soon. He sleeps fitfully in your lap and you're repeating it to yourself like a mantra, or a prayer. Something's going to give and you'll be free, because finally, finally something outside of yourself will force you to let him go and you'll make that final severance and it'll hurt, God, it'll hurt like having your heart ripped out of your chest, but you'll be free and the bridge will be burned and you will never be allowed to come back to him and that's what you need, when it's all said and done. You need a permanent split or a fatality, because nothing else could keep you away from him.

Because you'll come back, goddamnit. As long as there's breath in your body, you'll keep on coming right back to him. And if he says it, if he puts words to this feeling, you'll never be able to let him go.

\---

Hours pass. It's just you and the monster and him, waiting out the clock while you try your best not to think about what comes next.

If you unfocus your eyes enough, the broken glass around you looks like a sea of stars.

\---

Finally, your time runs out. Someone cuts the power to the lab. For the first time in three days, the lights are off and the sound of footsteps echos from down the hall.

There's a moment of vertigo when you realize what this means. Your time is up. You're going to learn if you can die, and you are going to kill Red Army soldiers in the process of learning it, and no matter what happens next you won't ever be able to touch him again. You're ending this as a traitor or a dead man, and either way you'll be a monster to the bitter goddamn end.

\---

You have his heart in your hands and you can't tell if you're cradling or crushing it and you can't say what you mean and you can't be better and at no point in this process have you ever stopped loathing him. 

\---

Tord stirs in your arms and you want to fight it, suddenly, want to dig your claws in and hold onto him for as long as you can because you're obstinate and lonely and you never _fucking_ learn, but the world is already collapsing into motion around you and someone in combat boots is kicking down the door and you're no longer in control of your body. Your skin rends itself apart. Your howls are deafening, even as the room fills with shouting men in riot gear. You've gone past the point of no return and now all that's left to do is fall.

\---

When the flashbang hits the ground, stunning the beast and leaving your ears ringing as everything goes to hell, you think, _now_. Slam the monster out of your body and take Tord's neck in your hands and all you have to do is twist and it's over, you're free, it's everything you've ever wanted and you can't see his face in the dark and he isn't fighting you, damnit, and you can't, you _can't do it_ , you can't kill him and you can't have him and you can't say it, you can't fucking say it, and kissing him feels cheap so here is what you do instead: you grab his face and press your forehead to his and you breathe the same air as him for one-two-three seconds, because this as close as you can ever let yourself get to him, to anyone, ever.

And then you pull away from him, and he tries to stop you, tries to drag you back down to him because when you're gone, there won't be anyone left who can calm him like you can. He's trying to tell you something, trying to raise his voice over the bedlam, and you think you know what it is that he's saying and your last and greatest and most awful middle finger to him is this: you don't listen. 

And then you're letting him go, and you're falling away, and you're going, and you're going, and you're gone, you're fucking _gone_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm a goddamn mess for you to clean up, but I like it  
> And your dream turned into a nightmare when I crawled inside it  
> And the whole world thinks I'm insane, and it might be true  
> But if I'm crazy, oh if I'm crazy  
> If I'm crazy, I'm crazy for you" - _If I'm Crazy_ , Amigo the Devil
> 
> \---
> 
> This fic was an unholy amalgamation of kink bingo, murder ballads, and whatever Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins were up to in the early 2010s. Di, if you're reading this, I'm sorry that the porn-to-plot ratio wasn't higher and also that I managed to drag pro wrestling into your totally respectable Eddsworld erotica for, like, the third time. Copy edits will get done sometime in the next two days, I swear.
> 
> For those of you who've been following me since 2017, hello again! Thank you all for your patience and kind words these past few years-- they really do mean the world to me. Special thanks as always go to the inimitable @jinxedlucky for keeping me sane through the writing process, and additional gratitude goes to Kaiya for reading and giving feedback on huge chunks of this fic at extremely weird hours despite knowing jack shit about EW; my shenanigans would not be possible without the two of them!
> 
> A quick status update: TTB's getting finished and I'm gunning to get the last part up by late October/early November. The draft's already hovering at a solid 11,000 words and will probably be closer to 20k on completion; it's going to all get posted as one massive chapter because of a stupid pun I thought of in high school that y'all will be subjected to later. I'll catch y'all again when that gets finished!


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